


Peace Offering

by ohmyfae



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd Needs a Hug, M/M, More character tags as they appear, Prisoner of War, Rating for Smut in later chapters, Some examples of racism/prejudice/xenophobia, everyone lives au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-22
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23261134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmyfae/pseuds/ohmyfae
Summary: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd should be dead.And he would be, if Claude von Riegan hadn’t intervened.Now, Dimitri is being dragged unceremoniously out of his own country, sent in exile as a gift to the newly crowned King Khalid of Almyra. Claude has volunteered to escort him, claiming some small knowledge of Almyran customs, but Dimitri, whose mind still lingers on the battlefields and killing grounds of his past, fails to see Claude’s true motivations for the journey. And Claude fails to factor in his own feelings into his newest machinations, which can make the journey far more dangerous than either of them expect.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 86
Kudos: 225





	1. Chapter 1

Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd should be dead.

He should have died in the Tailtean plains, there in the mud with Edelgard’s blade at his neck, the ghosts of his people snarling with every hissing breath. He should have died when Dedue was captured, when half the Alliance turned on them, revealing Claude von Riegan and a disguised unit of Fodlan traitors and Almyran soldiers. He should have died when half his men abandoned him on the field. But he didn’t, because when the blade struck the light of the sun and Dimitri spat his final words in Edelgard’s face, Claude— _Claude_ —had blocked her blow.

“No,” he’d said, as Dimitri and Edelgard stared at him, swaying as though jolted from an unpleasant dream. “No, there’s another way.”

Which is why Dimitri is here, chained and shackled on the polished floor of his own capital city while a traitor and a snake stand beneath the throne and discuss his future.

Claude has changed since Dimitri saw him last. He wears his colors in an unorthodox style, his cloak twisted into a sash, an unfamiliar gold insignia shining on his shoulder. Where Dimitri spent half his life honing his humility, trying to diminish his own consequence, Claude stands before the throne as though he’d always meant to be there, his presence threatening to engulf the room. Which it would if Edelgard weren’t here, with her blood-red gown and twisted horns, gazing down at Dimitri with a look that feels uncomfortably like pity.

“I’ve come to a difficult decision,” she says, and Dimitri swallows a bitter laugh. “Dimitri.”

“El,” Dimitri says, and smiles at the way her brows raise, just a fraction.

“Claude von Riegan has vouched for you,” Edelgard says. Dimitri’s gaze flicks to Claude, but his expression remains carefully neutral. “In lieu of an execution, you will be delivered to the king of Almyra, to spend the remainder of your days in exile.”

“It’s a peace offering,” Claude adds. “It’s tradition to give something to a new monarch there, and it’ll be a sign from Edelgard that she’s strong enough to rule, and that the alliance isn’t about to be disrupted by a former—“

Dimitri drags at his chains, pulling several of his guards a step across the marble floor, and Claude raises an eyebrow. Edelgard makes a motion with her hand, and the chains jerk, shorten, forcing his knees to buckle.

“You can’t _present_ me like a prize to an upstart foreign king,” Dimitri says. 

“First off, not an upstart,” Claude says, as though Dimitri were sitting down for dinner in the monastery, not being pushed to his knees at the end of a dozen feet of iron chains. “King Khalid of Almyra is legitimate, and his ascension was planned like, ten years ago. Second. Yeah. We kind of can. Present you, I mean. You’ll have to be more present _able,_ ” he adds, with a soft, faint smile. “But I hear they’re pretty rough and tumble there. They won’t mind if you’re a little banged-up.”

“It may be more merciful to execute him,” Edelgard says. Her voice is low, but Dimitri sinks the rest of the way to his knees and bows his head to listen. “His delusions make him volatile, dangerous—if he escapes on the road—“

“He won’t,” Claude says. He raises his voice and tilts his head towards Dimitri. “Will you?”

“You can both go to hell,” Dimitri says. Edelgard’s brows knit tight, but Claude just laughs. He strolls towards him, and the guards tighten their grip on the chains as Claude stops less than a foot away, hands on his hips. He looks down at Dimitri for a moment, and with his back to Edelgard, his expression is cold and unsmiling.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. He brushes at Dimitri’s bangs with his fingertips, almost gently, and Dimitri stares into his still, calculating eyes. “We’re gonna get along just fine.”

Claude insists on Dimitri being allowed to bathe before the Almyran sect of the Alliance heads out, and his cloak is hastily gathered up and disposed of before he can so much as scrape the week-old grime from his skin. He’s given new clothes—leathers and soft cotton in brown and gold—and he can’t help but feel exposed without the weight of the cloak on his shoulders. Edelgard’s soldiers shackle him again as he leaves the baths, but Claude rolls his eyes when he sees Dimitri clanking along like a puppet trailing strings. 

“That’s gonna get infected soon enough,” he says, and dismounts from his horse. He calls out to one of the Almyrans, and a group of them slide off their horses to grip Dimitri by the arms. The shackles are removed and handed to the guards like a dirty rag found in a noble’s crystalware, and Claude expertly ties Dimitri’s hands to the saddle of a large, placid destrier. 

“You’re gonna have to walk for a while,” he says. “Most of us will. Can’t wear out the horses.” Dimitri eyes the other riders, few of whom have bothered to dismount, and Claude shrugs. “They’re gonna want to show off for the Fodlans first, anyways. But even the wyverns get a break eventually. You’ll see.”

“And they’ll allow you to escort me?” Dimitri asks, from somewhere in the hot, oppressive weight simmering in his chest. “A traitor to your own country? Last I heard, the Almyrans despise cowards.”

One of the soldiers beside him shifts slightly, and Dimitri feels a prickle of unease, the charge in the air before a lightning strike. Claude just smiles.

“Sure. But don’t worry.” Claude slaps him on the arm. “As soon as this is over, I’m going straight home.”

The soldier next to Dimitri coughs, and a voice calls out from up the line, where a number of Fodlans are nervously edging around the Almyran forces. Dimitri catches a glimpse of pink hair, and Claude’s face brightens as he lifts his hand to wave.

“Claude, I’m dying here,” Hilda of House Goneril slumps against her horse like a sack of potatoes. “Are you done or what?”

“Tell Nader I’m coming,” Claude calls. He turns back to Dimitri. “I’ll check on you when we’re past the gates.”

“You don’t have to,” Dimitri says automatically, and grimaces. It’s an old habit—To make himself small, to put others at ease, to try and make them forget that the man standing before them was born with the promise of a crown on his brow. He hunches his shoulders instinctively, seeking the weight of his cloak on his back, and twists his hands in the bindings on the saddle horn. Claude gives him a curious look, but says nothing. He just turns, whistles sharply, and braces himself as a wyvern breaks from the file to wheel towards them. Dimitri’s boots scrape on the stone as the force of its wings push him back, and his horse shakes their head as though shooing off flies.

“Good girl,” Claude says, so soft that Dimitri almost misses it, and practically vaults onto the wyvern’s back. He swings into the saddle mid-air, one hand twisted in the tack, and a soldier next to Dimitri laughs and says something in Almyran. The other soldiers smile faintly, watching Claude bring his wyvern to the head of the Almyran formation, and a niggling sense of pride emerges through the fog in his mind. He may be tied to a horse, about to be marched through the streets of his own capital city as a prisoner for the amusement of a distant king, but at least there’s something of Fodlan that the Almyrans respect. Even if it _is_ the skill of a traitor.

But perhaps, he thinks, as the horses around him start to shift and huff and trot forward, there’s no love lost between Claude and Fodlan. Dimitri knows what the students at the monastery had to say about Dedue, certainly, and there were enough whispers about Claude, from his interest in poisons to the color of his skin, that even Dimitri caught on. 

_He wasn’t even legitimate until last year,_ a girl had said once, not five feet from where Claude was sitting in the dining hall. _And now he pretends he’s one of us. I hear his father was some savage from, you know._

Dimitri had opened his mouth to object, but Claude had just turned to the girl and smiled, bright eyes blank and humorless. _Actually, my mother is the savage one,_ he’d said, and the girl shrank in her seat, mortified. _You should see her with an axe sometime._

That was the trouble with Claude. He always had an answer for everything. He never let on if any of the talk bothered him, never blinked when students in mock battles hesitated or when whispers rose in the hall at his back, was never anything but gracious and amicable and closed-off like a shuttered house in a storm. Dimitri had wondered, once or twice, if anyone ever truly got to know Claude von Riegan. If he even knew himself.

Now, a lifetime away from discovering whoever that young man had been, Dimitri stumbles after his horse as the company surges forward, and watches Claude’s wyvern wheel slowly in the cloudless sky, batlike wings cutting off the sun.


	2. Chapter 2

Claude makes good on his promise a few miles beyond the city walls, just as the wyverns land under a copse of trees and pages rush through the company, checking on horses and delivering water to the soldiers on foot. It turns the company into something more of a traveling family than an army, with knights jostling each other, soldiers carefully approaching irate wyverns, and a group of anxious Almyrans eyeing the tight circle of Faerghus warriors accompanying them. Dimitri almost misses the flash of gold in the chaos, but Claude has a talent for making himself impossible to ignore when he needs to be. Soldiers turn to him as he passes, laying a hand on his shoulder or whispering a word or two in Almyran, and Claude pauses every few steps to answer back, clap a shoulder or an arm, or flash an easy smile. 

“Turning new traitors already?” Dimitri asks, when Claude approaches him. Claude sighs gustily.

“It’s called making friends, Dimitri. Don’t pretend you’ve never had one.” He unties the ropes from the saddle horn, but leaves Dimitri’s hands bound. Dimitri eyes the end of the rope held loosely in Claude’s palm like an afterthought. “You need anything? I’m amazed you’re still standing, honestly.”

“Was exhausting me the point?” Dimitri asks. It’s true—His legs are painfully sore, and his mouth is caked with dust, but he’s borne through worse.

“Maybe. Nothing like being dragged behind a horse to make you feel better about being tied to one. Come on, let’s get you some water.”

Claude practically drags him out of the line of horses and over to his wyvern, who has rolled halfway to her back and is pawing at gnats like an overgrown cat. Claude smiles at her fondly and twists the rope around his wrist before ducking down to dig one-handed in his bag. He comes up with a waterskin, which he pops open and carefully places in Dimitri’s hands. It’s awkward going, but Dimitri manages to wet his mouth enough to feel halfway human again before passing it back.

“You’re welcome,” Claude says.

“You’re mad if you think I’ll thank you for this,” Dimitri says. Claude knocks back the waterskin. “You’re doing me no favors. You’re doing _yourself_ no favors. What do you have to gain from this?”

“Maybe I’m sick of watching people die,” Claude says. His eyes are bright in the glare of the sun, and his shoulders are oddly straight, a perfect line against the fields beyond. “You ever think of that?”

“I doubt the king of Almyra will let an enemy king live,” Dimitri says. He stumbles as Claude collapses next to his wyvern, who trills slightly before returning to the gnats. The rope is still held tight in Claude’s fist, but it’s a small defense against a man trained for battle from the cradle, and he knows it. Dimitri scans the grasses around them and spots the telltale flicker of armor and leather in the trees.

Archers. Of course. He sits carefully, and Claude passes him jerky from his bag.

“They don’t really kill prisoners in Almyra,” Claude says. “I mean, sometimes, I guess, but political prisoners get the star treatment, usually. You’ll probably end up in an estate somewhere.”

“You seem to know a great deal about them,” Dimitri says, slowly. Claude leans back against his wyvern’s side, tugging Dimitri’s arms after him. 

“My weapons trainer lived there,” he says. “I grew up listening to his stories—didn’t really have a choice _not_ to. Besides, it doesn’t do any good to close ourselves off from the rest of the world. That’s a sure way to end up hacking each other’s heads off in a field somewhere.”

Dimitri bristles at this. He can still taste the mud of the plains at the back of his throat, see the shadows of his soldiers twisting in the dark, their mouths open, eyes wide. Fire among the corpses of Duscur. “You speak lightly of things you don’t understand, Claude.”

Claude looks at Dimitri, really looks at him, and Dimitri suppresses an unfamiliar shiver in his spine. Claude is the image of repose, one foot propped up on his knee, a hand behind his head, scarf twisted to muss his sweat-curled hair, but there’s something dangerous beneath it all, something cold. When Dimitri was young, his step-mother had told him of deep pools in her hometown that had dormant springs underneath, vast underwater cave systems winding under the earth, with currents and ecosystems of their own. He sees something of that in Claude, now, behind his lazy, unassuming smile, and he suspects that he _wouldn’t_ see it unless Claude wanted him to.

Claude looks away, and his wyvern rolls to the side, sheltering him under their wing. “Better eat something before we go,” he says, closing his eyes. “Long ride to Almyra.”

Dimitri is taken by three soldiers by the time Claude starts to doze off, who show him to the privies and allow him to rub at his wrists for a moment, working some feeling back into his fingers. He keeps an eye on the wyvern, though, even when he’s strapped securely to the saddle of his horse, and spots Hilda climbing under the wyvern’s wing. Her feet prop up over Claude’s for a minute, and when the wing twitches back, they’re both laughing, passing a flask back and forth between them. A soldier riding past Dimitri turns to stare and mutters something, and a page, holding up a feed bag to Dimitri’s horse, gasps sharply.

“What was that?” Dimitri asks. The page blinks at him. “What did he say?”

“I don’t understand,” the page says. “I don’t... speak. Speak?”

“You were right the first time,” Dimitri says. He risks a smile, but the page blanches and looks away. He raises a hand to his face, straining the ropes fixed to the saddle, and runs a thumb over his mouth while the page hastily closes the feed bag and scrambles into the line of shuffling horses.

“Wonderful,” he drawls. “I’m a boar prince after all. Felix must feel vindicated.”

Wherever Felix is. Dimitri hadn’t seen him with the dead, nor with those Edelgard had clapped in irons after Dimitri’s defeat. He could’ve been captured like Dedue, but he wonders if he still isn’t out there somewhere, licking his wounds. Biding his time.

Dimitri gazes out over the plains, but all he sees are wyverns pouncing through the grass, snapping playfully at each other’s tails. A young woman runs between them to usher them close, and ends up racing for the trees as they turn on her instead. Claude dashes off with two other soldiers to wrangle the beasts, and Dimitri leans on the saddle as Claude wraps his arms around a wyvern’s neck, giving their rider time to mount. The beast tries to buck him, but he hangs on, and one of the soldiers braces his back with both hands.

“Hilda!” Claude shouts, slipping free to turn to the second wyvern. “Not the time!”

Hilda, who is trying to sneak up behind the wyvern, shouts something unintelligible and flips Claude a rude gesture.

He’s in his element here, Dimitri thinks. Claude was always a sharpshooter with the bow, and his swordplay was a little flashy but solid, but Dimitri had never really seen him with a wyvern before. He leans further on the saddle, trying to get a closer look, and a soldier sidles up to him, a hand on the pommel of his sword.

In the field, Claude wraps his legs around the riderless wyvern and swings himself upright. One of the soldiers cheers, and Claude wraps a rider’s tack around the wyvern. It gentles, snapping at the air like a disgruntled bird, and Claude pats its jaw to the sound of scattered applause.

“Makes sense he has a knack for it,” one of the soldiers says. “Boy’s half beast himself.”

“Hey,” someone snaps, and the soldier lowers his hood and spurs his horse down the line. The woman who chided him follows him, shouting something in Almyran, and Claude looks up from where he’s wiping his face with a cloth. His gaze follows the retreating soldier for a moment, then snaps back to one of the wyvern riders beside him. He flashes her a charming smile, and she bumps him with her elbow.

Perhaps the Almyrans aren’t so comfortable with a traitor after all, Dimitri thinks, and files that away for another time.

His father used to say that it was near impossible to fall asleep on a horse, but having been trussed up like a hunting trophy after bumping and staggering along at the horse’s side all day, Dimitri finds himself swaying in the saddle before long. Someone takes his reins—Marianne, he thinks, from the flash of blue in the corner of his eye—and he hears a voice in his ear. A soft voice. A woman’s voice.

His mother.

El. Frowning as she takes his hand in a death grip, guiding him along the dance floor. Felix’s laughter as Dimitri struggles to repeat the steps in the garden, after. Lying in the flowers while his father marches by, trying not to make a sound.

Fire in the sockets of the teenaged boy who’d scored a point against him in the training yards just that morning.

Ash on his tongue. Clawed hands twisted in the dirt, ponds of blood under pale, curled lips, the rattle of his own breath in the silence—

“Hey.”

Dimitri jerks awake, breathing hard, and twists away at the warmth of a hand on his chest. Moonlight slides over Claude’s face as he presses down and slips another hand behind Dimitri’s head. It takes him a moment to realize he’s lying down, and another to notice that his own hands are gripping Claude’s upper arms tight enough to bruise. Claude grimaces but doesn’t twist away, and his dark hair falls over his eyes.

“Breathe,” he says. “Breathe with me.”

His hand rises. Dimitri sucks in a breath.

“You’re in the Almyran camp,” Claude says. “The war’s over.” 

His hand presses down. Dimitri breathes out. There are fingers kneading in his hair, gentle, too gentle. Stars wheeling behind Claude’s eyes.

“I’m gonna get you out of here,” Claude whispers. “Breathe.”

Dimitri breathes in.

“You’re gonna have time to deal with this.”

Dimitri breathes out.

“Claude?”

Claude looks up. He runs his fingers through Dimitri’s hair as a woman approaches in a blue gown—Marianne, Dimitri thinks. He knows her. She looks down at him, and he struggles to rise, but she backs up fast, hands clenching in her skirts.

“Sorry,” Dimitri gasps.

“It’s fine,” she whispers. She glances at Claude. “Do you need anything?”

“Nah, I’m good,” Claude says. “Maybe a heavier blanket?”

She patters off, and Claude turns back to Dimitri. “You alright?”

“Yes,” Dimitri says. For a lie, it’s a miserable one. “It’s nothing to trouble anyone over.”

Claude’s mouth twists. “Sure.” He slides his hand from under Dimitri’s head, and Dimitri almost leans into it before he remembers himself. “Think you can get back to sleep? We’re riding most of tomorrow. “ 

Dimitri chokes out a hollow laugh, and Claude pats his chest before rolling onto his back next to him. When Dimitri glances his way, Claude bares his teeth. 

“You know they’ve got guards watching us,” he says. “I’m fine here.”

“Huh.” Dimitri lets his head tip back on the grass, staring at a clustered band of stars. “What did you mean before?”

“Mm?” Claude’s voice is low, inflectionless.

“When you said you’d get me out of here,” Dimitri whispers. “What did you mean?”

Claude doesn’t answer.

“Claude?” After a moment, Dimitri rises on his elbow. Claude’s eyes are closed, chest rising and falling slowly, and he doesn’t so much as flinch when Dimitri sits over him. There’s a fine chain around his neck, gold winking against the soft folds of his undershirt, with a heavy clasped pendant peeking out between a gap in the buttons. Carefully, Dimitri reaches out to hook his fingers in the chain.

Claude’s hand snaps around Dimitri’s wrist, tight as a vise.

“Get some sleep, Dimitri,” Claude says. His eyes are still closed, but his fingers are perilously tense, almost trembling. Dimitri pulls away, and Claude lets go. He tucks the pendant under his shirt again, and Dimitri lies back, the echoes of the dead fading against the pressure on his wrist, the touch of gold on his fingertips, the sound of Claude’s voice under his own rasping breaths.

_I’m gonna get you out of here._

Dimitri watches the stars until they start to fade and blur, until the sound of wind in the grass and the soft sigh of Claude’s breath lulls him into the dark, and a sleep without dreams.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s been two days since they stepped beyond the city walls, and the sun is perversely high in the sky, gilding the soft fields with light they don’t deserve. The land has no right to be so quiet, so peaceful, flowers bowing before the wind as though no soldiers scattered their petals just weeks before. There’s no sign of the graves lining the edges of distant battlefields, no hushed whispers of soldiers skirting the border of defeat. It’s as though the earth has swallowed the war whole, leaving behind nothing but grass and rabbit warrens, and Dimitri watches it all with an ache in his chest that won’t subside, his fingers clenched on the reins of his horse.

Hooves thunder in the soft earth, and Dimitri’s horse shakes out her mane with a huff.

“I thought you might want to know,” Claude says. He sidles up to Dimitri on a magnificent roan gelding with golden bells on his tack. The horse is perfectly suited for Claude, who has taken off his cloak in favor of a red tunic and a gold scarf to hold back his hair—They’re both a splash of color against the leather uniforms of the soldiers around them. “We’re being followed.”

Dimitri stiffens in his saddle, and his horse snorts in irritation. “By the empire?”

“No, they turned back yesterday,” Claude says. “I mean someone else. Check the hill behind us. Turn slowly. Pretend we’re talking about something else.”

Dimitri sighs—he never was any good at subterfuge—and tries to let his gaze slide vaguely over the hill. There are scattered bushes here and there, high grasses untouched by wandering herds, but Dimitri sees nothing out of the ordinary in their shadow.

“There,” Claude says. “See it? Blue on green’s kind of hard to spot, but it’s there. They’ve been on our tail since Edelgard stopped sending scouts to make sure we’re actually taking you to Almyra.”

Dimitri squints into the wind, but still sees nothing. “Could it be one of hers?”

“Doubtful. They have an air to them, you know? This guy’s being careful.” Claude’s fingers brush the side of his bow. “Be on your guard.”

“I’m still tied to the saddle,” Dimitri says, and Claude gives him a considering look, green eyes dipping down Dimitri’s straight-backed form and up again. Heat pools in Dimitri’s belly, and he clenches his teeth.

“Yeah, but you could get free if you wanted to,” Claude says. “I’d say you’d make it, mm. Maybe fifty yards?”

“With a horse, or without?” Dimitri asks, curious despite himself. 

“Less with a horse. We don’t—“ Claude makes a face. “No one likes shooting a horse down, but you know what tends to happen when you fall with one. I’d rather you didn’t,” he adds, patting Dimitri’s leg. “Call me sentimental, but you look better alive. And I like this old girl. Her name means Butterball in Almyran, did you know?”

“We haven’t been formally introduced,” Dimitri drawls, and Claude actually smiles at that, a real smile, crinkling his eyes at the corners.

“Yeah, well, don’t die,” he says, and wheels his horse away, towards the rear of the company. Ignatz, one of his men from Garreg Mach, races over, and Claude leans in the saddle, bending his head low. They speak for a moment, then Ignatz runs off, disappearing into the throng.

“The king likes you.” The speaker is an Almyran soldier, a man with long hair tied back out of his face and a gold stripe on his shoulder, and he looks at Dimitri out of the corner of his eye. “He thinks you’re a challenge.”

Dimitri frowns. “The king knows of me?” Of course he would, he supposes, but with the borders closed, spies back home are few and far between. They sent the last one packing six years ago, to Dimitri’s knowledge.

The soldier narrows his eyes. “Ah. Yes. Word travels. You’re like a horse no one wants to break, or a wyvern in the fields. Wild. He likes wild things.”

Dimitri isn’t certain if he should be offended or not. The soldier almost sounds impressed, as though the rage that threatens to choke Dimitri in his darkest hours is something to be proud of. Something that can be controlled. “I haven’t heard much of King Khalid, to be honest.”

“He likes his privacy.” The soldier smiles slightly. “But he likes trouble more. You see his wyvern?”

“Ah. No.” 

“Pretty girl. Evil. Wicked. Came to us wild.” The soldier’s smile spreads. “When he was a boy, his half-cousins said, Come, we have a present for you in the stables.”

“Not this again,” another soldier says, from where she’s brushing her horse. She scowls darkly at her hands. “It was a cruel trick.”

“Is it a trick if he knew?” the first soldier asks. “Well, Prince Khalid, he knew his cousins weren’t very clever, and he knew what they’d left in the stables for him, so he took meat from the table and wrapped it under his shirt, like a baby—“

The other soldier mutters under her breath.

“And when he comes into the stable, bam! The little shits lock the doors. Just him and a half-starving, feral wyvern. He was in there for six hours before the king found him. Six!”

“He still rides her,” the other soldier says, in a soft voice. “Seven years old, and he tamed a wyvern.”

“We would have crowned him there and then if he weren’t a—“ The first soldier says something, then, and the one brushing her horse shoots him a dark look.

“What was that?” Dimitri asks.

“It’s nothing,” the other soldier says. She clucks to her horse. “Just empty air.”

Dimitri tries to turn to the first soldier, but his cheeks are burning, and he spurs his horse further down the line. Dimitri sits back in the saddle, watching the Almyran wyverns wheel lazily above, and considers what kind of a man a boy like Prince Khalid would turn into. Someone who sees a starving, cornered animal and doesn’t think to run. Someone who views a monster in pain as a challenge.

He isn’t sure he likes being a _challenge._

He certainly doesn’t like the thought of being _wild._ He hates what it makes him, the taste of rage and fear on his tongue, the helplessness, the hysterics bubbling just under the surface as he drags himself through it and out the other side. 

Claude trots past, and Dimitri is surprised to see Marianne in the saddle in front of him, laughing and holding onto his sash. Hilda races by on a white horse a few seconds later, and there’s an almighty chorus of shouting as she tries to drag Marianne off Claude’s horse. Dimitri urges his own horse—Butterball, apparently—into sight just in time for Hilda and Claude to descend into an inglorious slap-fight. Marianne, laughing so hard she has tears streaming down her cheeks, carefully dismounts and slips away.

The mountains at the border between the Leicester Alliance and the kingdom of Almyra tower over them by the time the sun sinks to a smudged thumbprint over the horizon, and Dimitri is sore enough to fall from the saddle when he’s finally unstrapped. He curses under his breath, kneading at his thighs with both hands, and squints up at the uneven ridge standing stark against the sky. The mountains look perilously bare this time of year, with only a few patches of scraggly trees, but no one else in the company seems particularly concerned.

Claude appears seemingly out of the ether, dressed down in his tunic and loose cotton trousers in a style Dimitri hasn’t seen before, and grabs Dimitri by the shoulders. Dimitri’s legs are still stinging, so sore from riding that he can barely go a step without help, and Claude stops just at the edge of camp, panting softly.

“Right,” he whispers. “Sorry about this, but I can’t risk a fight when we’re in the mountain pass.”

Dimitri doesn’t get a chance to do more than open his mouth in confusion when Claude twists his sash in both hands, fits it in Dimitri’s mouth like he’s an unruly horse being broken to bridle, and ties it expertly behind his head. Dimitri tries to rise, but his legs tremble, worn out by the long ride, and he looks into Claude’s eyes with the sudden realization that he’d _planned_ this, he’d _known—_

“Shackles!” Claude shouts. Dimitri reaches for him, but Claude ducks out of the way, and soldiers descend on all sides, pinning him to the ground. He jerks as his arms are twisted behind his back, snarls through the gag, but Claude just crouches in front of him and holds his face with both hands.

“We’re drawing him out,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, but you’re gonna have to be bait, and I can’t have you ruining this. You’re a shit liar, Dimitri.”

“The hell are you trying to say?” Dimitri grunts through the gag. Claude sighs.

“Our follower needs incentive to act,” he says. “And if he is who I think he is, you’re incentive enough. Guard him,” he snaps, in a louder voice. “We can’t have him trying to escape again. If he runs, aim for the tendons.”

His voice carries over the rocky field, and Dimitri catches a shadow slipping through the grass, not forty yards away.

“I love being right,” Claude whispers, and Dimitri rolls his eyes. “Keep a perimeter on the western side, facing the fort! If Dimitri has allies, they’ll be there. Hilda! I need you.” 

He stalks off, leaving Dimitri surrounded by soldiers staring in the opposite direction of the shadow in the field, just as Ignatz scrambles up a tree with a weighted net over his shoulder. The tree rustles in the breeze, and Dimitri catches Marianne fumbling with her shoes just out of range. She sits down, seemingly just to get a better look at her boot, and the shadow sinks lower.

“Men!” Nader’s voice is a bellow at Dimitri’s back. “Don’t crowd the prisoner, spread out!” 

Two of the soldiers at his back start to walk off, and Marianne looks up, twisting a symbol in the dirt with her finger. Claude is standing next to a horse off to the side, and Dimitri frowns as he sets a jar down and dips three arrows into the dark, smoky mixture at the bottom. The company retreats slowly, idly, as though Claude weren’t blowing on the arrowheads in his fist, and Dimitri finally sees the flash of blue in the grass as Felix emerges from the underbrush.

Marianne stands. Felix’s sword is drawn, his cloak a ragged scrap of cloth flapping at his back, but he ducks out of the way as she brings a glyph to life, sliding directly under the shards of her magic. Dust rises in the darkening sky, and a soldier calls out, drawing his sword. Felix’s grin is wild, desperate, and he slices through the net whirling towards him as without a second’s hesitation. A soldier charges him, holds off his blow for one agonizing second, and is thrown back with a cry that echoes in the dark. Another two soldiers approach, and Dimitri shouts through the gag, but Felix is too busy slashing through their defenses to spot Claude with his bow drawn, one arrow on the string—

The arrow flies.

Claude shouts an order in Almyran, and the soldiers scramble out of the way, leaving Felix with a clear line of sight to Claude. He strikes the first arrow out of the air with his sword, but the second hits his left shoulder, and the third grazes his cheek, leaving a dark red line against his pallid skin. 

Felix doesn’t hesitate.

He surges forward, sword still clenched in his hand, and nearly makes it before his legs buckle. He curses. A soldier approaches, but Claude shouts another order, and slowly walks across the open ground. Felix drags himself another step, staggers, and drops to his knees.

“Your majesty,” he says, for the first time.

His fingers slip on the hilt of his sword. Blood soaks the collar of his uniform, and his hair hangs unbound in his face as he bends forward, the last free man of Faerghus bowing to his captive king, before his eyes flutter closed and he collapses with a soft, broken sigh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuck ME would anyone mind TERRIBLY if this ends up being Claude/Dimitri/Felix because I can not write these two in the same place without it being emotionally intense aksbaksnsjsn


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. So. So maybe the ship just changed, because I can’t throw Dimitri and Felix in the same place without a ship forming, and now we have an OT3.
> 
> (Made a choice here with Khalid as Claude’s main name because he’s shifting back to his responsibilities as a ruler of Almyra, and Claude is not a moniker he seemed to intend on keeping forever.)

King Khalid of Almyra, third of his name and rightful heir to the Almyran throne, sits alone in his tent and tries not to scream into his hands.

Two of them. There are two of them now—Two supremely fucked-up sons of Faerghus, chewed up and spat out by a war no one should have started, raised to cherish noble lineages that only ever led to warmongering or misery. He knew he’d have to deal with Felix sooner or later—He’d seen how Felix watched Dimitri in the halls at school, he wasn’t a _fool_ —but now he has a drugged, wounded man tripping balls in the makeshift infirmary while Dimitri curses out anyone who tries to coax him out of his sight. They’ll probably pull each other down together, reinforcing whatever bullshit nonsense the war’s instilled in them. 

He’ll have to drag them both to Almyra, then.

Khalid sprawls on the ground and groans softly. His tent is fashioned in the style of Fodlan—never mind that Marianne and Hilda, the only two of his house he’ll let follow him through the mountains, already know, but Dimitri’s too wrapped up in his own mess to put the clues together, and who knows how Felix will react.

He probably knows. Edelgard figured it out in the first year, apparently, even if she was kind enough not to let on. And Khalid did shout orders in perfect Almyran, and his soldiers obeyed.

He huffs out a laugh into his hands. Sure, half his soldiers probably don’t even _like_ him, but at least they’ll follow orders.

“Your majesty.” He glances up. Omar, one of the younger soldiers, he thinks. Scared of spiders. Decent rider. Has a brother somewhere, maybe a clerk? Khalid rubs a hand over his face and pushes himself upright, and Omar bows awkwardly. “The, uh, the man in the healer’s tent is asking for you.”

“Asking or demanding?”

Omar grimaces.

“Alright. Thank you, Omar.” He gets to his feet as Omar flees the tent, and reaches for his cloak. He stops, brushing the folds of his grandfather’s herald stitched on the inner shoulder. A Fodlan cloak for a Fodlan noble. For Claude. He’s been Claude for long enough that he doesn’t hesitate when someone calls the name, but all it took was a few weeks with the soldiers of Almyra to nearly forget it again. Claude’s still there, of course—he always has been, in the features of Khalid’s face that are too Fodlan to ignore—but he has duties to more than just Fodlan, now.

He leaves the cloak where it lies, and pushes down the unsettled roll of his stomach as he closes the flap of his tent after him.

He sees Dimitri’s shadow, first. The healer’s tent is pitched near the campfire to make it easier to carry boiling water, and Khalid can see the dark figure passing back and forth inside the tent, blocking the lamplight. If someone bothered to bind Dimitri, they hadn’t done a very good job of it, but he’s fairly sure Dimitri could have undone most of his bindings at any time. No prince survives to kinghood without learning a thing or two about rope.

He gestures to the guards at the tent (Lamar and Miri, or Miriam—he’ll have to double check, later), who step forward, eyeing the entrance warily. “There’s going to be fighting in there,” he says, in Almyran. “Don’t come in unless I call you. I have it handled.”

They bob their heads, and Khalid gives them an encouraging smile before ducking into the tent.

Dimitri has his hands on him in seconds. He’s bound to a post, at least, which is the only reason he hasn’t tried to kill Khalid in his own tent, probably, but his hands are untied and fixed almost gently around his throat, with just the slightest pressure in his fingertips. Khalid raises both hands in surrender, then hooks his legs around Dimitri’s. They both go down with a thud that shakes the cot at the end of the room, where Felix watches them through half-lidded eyes.

“The fuck did you do to him?” Dimitri snarls. Khalid shoves a thumb at his good eye, and Dimitri recoils, giving him enough time to wrench his hands away.

“It’s just a sedative,” Khalid says, talking fast. “Sort of. Slows you down for a while. Harmless in small doses.”

“You _shot_ him with it.” Dimitri’s face is a mask of fury.

“Mmhm. You mean to say, Thank you, Claude, for making sure Felix didn’t get his dumb ass killed trying to invade a full company of soldiers alone. Thank you, Claude, for not shooting him through the eye when it would be a hell of a lot less trouble to kill him.”

“You’re talking,” Felix mumbles, from the cot. “Dimitri, the bees are talking.”

Khalid meets Dimitri’s judgmental gaze. “And maybe it’s a hallucinogen,” he says. “A mild one. Makes you see pretty patterns, mostly. Look, I tried it on myself first, I always do.”

“Hair’s so long,” Felix says. His hand flops over the edge of the cot. “Dim’tri, my hair’s so long, feel my hair.”

“You could have warned me,” Dimitri says. Some of the rage is draining from his face, leaving him tired and wan. 

“I did tell you,” Khalid says. “We were being followed. You were bait. That counts as being told.”

“Stop talking to the bees,” Felix says.

Dimitri groans and turns from Khalid. He sinks to his knees at Felix’s side, looking more of a vassal than a king as he raises a hand to Felix’s sweat-damp skin. Felix tries to say something, but he quiets at Dimitri’s hand in his hair, brushing back his unruly bangs. From where Khalid is standing, he can tell Felix’s wound is bandaged well enough, and—yes, alright, maybe there are straps on the cot, but they’re untied for now, hanging loose. 

“Annette said not to,” Felix whispers. “Had to try.”

“Thought you said I was a fool,” Dimitri says, in a low voice. “You were the one who suggested surrender.”

“When I thought you’d live,” Felix says. “Your mouth moves like. Everything’s so soft. Claude’s a fucking asshole.”

“Thanks,” Khalid says. Felix lolls his head back to stare.

“You’re an asshole,” he says.

Khalid grins at him, but Felix doesn’t even have the energy to scowl. Dimitri stays there a minute, stroking his hair, until Felix’s breath starts to even out and his eyes flutter closed. Dimitri watches him, there on his knees with Khalid standing back as a shadow in the tent, until his voice comes to him, oddly hoarse and thin.

“He was always fighting me,” Dimitri says. “After a... skirmish we were in, before you came to the academy... he could barely look at me.”

“But he stayed with you,” Khalid says. “He’s here. That counts for something, doesn’t it? Not many people get that kind of loyalty.”

Dimitri doesn’t answer.

“It’s true.”

“Is that why you didn’t kill him?” Dimitri asks. “Or is it something else?”

“I told you. I’m tired of watching people die. And the Almyrans respect warriors who can win a battle without just stabbing someone through the heart and calling it a day.”

Dimitri turns from Felix, whose fingers twitch in what Khalid can only hope is a pleasant dream. “You seem to care a great deal what they think of you.”

Khalid swallows his own bitter laugh and crosses his arms. “I don’t care what _anyone_ thinks of me, Dimitri. That’s how you get by in this country. We’re just about to spend a week climbing a fucking mountain with these people, and I’m not gonna start worrying what’ll happen if I trip and no one’s there to catch me.”

Dimitri gives him an appraising look. “And here I thought you were a good liar, Claude.”

Khalid smiles at the name on Dimitri’s tongue. He remembers his grandfather, half dead in his sickbed but still mustering enough energy to call the son of a king _boy_ until he chose _a proper name, a Fodlan name._ How it had felt to speak it aloud that first time, trying to convince himself it didn’t hurt. It wasn’t a concession. Just a necessity. No one would trust a Fodlan named Khalid, but Claude? Claude, at least, they could tolerate.

“I _am,_ ” he says. “Trust me.”

Dimitri actually laughs properly, and Khalid uncrosses his arms, hooking his thumbs in his belt instead. Dimitri looks younger when he laughs. Sure, his face goes red and he has a tendency to snort, but he’s almost...

“Alright,” he says. Khalid startles out of his thoughts, and Dimitri stifles another laugh. “Alright. You betrayed me. You turned on the Alliance. You sided with Edelgard—who started all of this—“

“Apparently at ten years old, but okay, we’ll talk about that later,” Khalid adds.

“And now you’ve tied me to a tent post and drugged my advisor. Let’s go ahead and trust you, then.”

Khalid shrugs. “Best decision you’ll make all year.” Dimitri sits on the tent floor, one arm propped up on the cot next to Felix, and Khalid steps back. “I’ll leave you guys alone. The drugs should wear off in an hour or so.”

He backs for the door, but stops at the sound of Dimitri’s voice, almost too soft to make out.

“Thank you.” Dimitri brushes Felix’s palm with his fingers, almost idly. “For keeping him alive.”

Khalid doesn’t answer. He just steps out of the tent, gives the guards another false smile, and marches for the edge of the camp, where the remaining members of his old house are lounging on bedrolls in the open air.

“Claude!” Leonie Pinelli looks up from a handful of cards pressed close to her chest. “Sit down, Hilda’s trying to beat Ignatz at poker.”

“Not trying,” Hilda says, shooting Ignatz a warning look. “Am. Also, Marianne, I told you about the—look, you don’t want to get rid of that card yet—“

“Oh.” Marianne blushes as Hilda takes her deck from her, and Khalid—Claude—oh, hell—sits in the space Leonie has made for him. If Lorenz were here, he’d probably be dragging Khalid all over the camp, lecturing him half to death—He almost misses it, really. But Lorenz is gone, off to take Khalid’s place in the Alliance, and now he’s left feeling slightly off-kilter, not quite at peace in this small circle. Hilda deals him in, and Ignatz unsuccessfully tries to explain why giving Marianne advice on her hand is technically cheating, but no one cares. Not really. 

“We can come with you, you know,” Leonie says, when Marianne has gathered up her winnings. “I don’t like the thought of you three being out here on your own.”

“The less it looks like Fodlan is invading, the better,” Khalid says. “And the Alliance needs you. Things are gonna be wobbly for a while, even with Edelgard in charge. She’s got her own weird shit to deal with.”

“You’ll be back, though,” Ignatz says.

Hilda answers for him. “You think I’m letting him disappear? Please.”

“I might stay,” Marianne says. Everyone turns to stare, and she blushes. “I’d like to see what it’s like there. We don’t... hear much about them, in Fodlan. And I heard they have miniature wyverns. And horses.”

“Oh goddess, I forgot you’re a horse girl,” Hilda says, and Marianne smiles down at her hands.

“Maybe we can ask the king to give you a horse, then,” Khalid says. He’ll give her twenty if she asks for it, honestly, and judging by how Marianne blushes deeper still, she probably knows. “Or a wyvern. One of the little white ones.”

“Get me a bigger one, though,” Hilda says. “Do they have gold wyverns there?”

“Only in myth.”

“Then I want one of those,” Hilda says. “You can catch it for me.”

The others laugh and roll their eyes, and Hilda breaks into a long, rambling description of the dream wyvern that Khalid is probably actually going to find for her, one day. Khalid leans back on Leonie’s sleeping bag, hands behind his head, and lets the others’ voices wash over him, drowning out the memory of the two men in the tents behind them, unmoored and anchorless, drifting on the tide.


	5. Chapter 5

The company reaches the mountain pass in the mid-afternoon, after a boisterous farewell to Ignatz and Leonie, who take three horses back to the Alliance with a cache of supplies. Felix Hugo Fraldarius, as befitting a noble of Faerghus, is dumped unceremoniously in a small cart that looks like a glorified wheelbarrow, which he shares with a baby wyvern one of the pages refused to leave behind in Almyra. The wyvern is blue and grey, dappled like the surface of a wind-swept lake, and she keeps trying to lick Felix’s hair as he lies in pathetic misery in a lump of blankets and hay.

“Can’t believe he fucking shot me,” he says, when Dimitri tries yet again to dislodge Felix’s hair from the wyvern’s teeth. 

“I can,” Dimitri says. Claude is flying with the wyverns today, moving restlessly up and down the line, and Dimitri holds his hand over his good eye to seek out his wyvern. “He always favored the bow, and he said he wasn’t trying to kill you in any case.”

“I knew _that,_ ” Felix says. He shifts in the cart, drawing up his hair with his uninjured arm, and the wyvern trills sadly. “Yeah, yeah, turn the puppy eyes on someone else. Look, Claude wasn’t going to kill me. I knew that going into this.” He sits up and curses. “I saw him with you and Edelgard, you know. Looked like hell.”

“Really,” Dimitri says. He tries to remember that moment in the field, when Claude lay his bare hand on Edelgard’s axe. His face had been perfectly composed, even through the mud, and his voice was level compared to the hiss of restless ghosts and the snarl rising in Dimitri and Edelgard’s throats. 

“You don’t pay any attention to the living, Dimitri,” Felix says, and Dimitri can’t help but smile at Felix’s familiar scowl. “Claude jumped off his fucking wyvern for you. Pretty sure I saw his leg go under for a second. You know. Twisted up, like—“ He bends his arm at an unnatural angle. “Limped across a fucking battlefield like it was one of _his_ people getting the axe. Thought he was gonna kill you both for a second there, but I couldn’t... get to you.” 

Dimitri touches Felix’s shoulder, just for a second, and Felix looks away. “He had his own reasons. Look at where he’s taking us.” He glances at the soldiers flanking them on either side, bows in easy reach.

“Yeah, as far from Edelgard as we can get,” Felix says. The wyvern starts to chew on his cloak, but Felix doesn’t bat her away. He just fixes Dimitri with his sharp gaze, the one Dimitri has spent the last few months avoiding, laying him bare with no attempt to soften the blow. “He’s covering for you.”

“I did suspect something of the sort,” Dimitri protests.

“Yeah. You can almost be perceptive, when your head isn’t so far up your own ass you can whistle a—“

“Please. Felix.”

Felix attempts to shrug, winces, and lies back down in the hay. The cart bumps it’s way up the beaten path through a gap in the mountain range, passing under a canopy of oak leaves. His face is pale with blood loss, but he watches the branches pass by with an almost peaceful expression, lips slightly parted. It’s as though he’s spent the last year tangling the careful, ordered web of his mind, twisting tighter with every short, terse argument and miserable battle, and now that he has Dimitri in his sights and a war slipping away behind him, he’s starting to tug the knots loose again. He sighs, and the wyvern sniffs his hair.

“Whatever Claude’s motivations, it’s good to have you with me,” Dimitri whispers.

“Like you have a choice,” Felix says. Dimitri almost smiles at that, except the wyvern chooses that moment to open her jaws as wide as possible and fit half of Felix’s head inside, and it takes both of them to push her away and rearrange Felix’s hair into some semblance of order. They give up ten minutes in, and Felix just sighs as the wyvern laps at his long hair like a cat, ruining his braid and making his bangs stick up sideways in the hay.

Dimitri keeps a hand on the cart, watching the trees as Felix groans faintly and tries to prevent the wyvern from curling up in his lap. He’s never been this close to the mountains before, and the bare slopes of rock above them look like the rough curves of a crudely-made fortress, shot through with red clay. Every now and then, Claude’s wyvern flies into view, a flicker of white scales and translucent wings, and Dimitri tries to remember if Claude walked with a limp, back on the battlefield. Admittedly, he’d been a little preoccupied, but surely a twist or a sprain would hurt even now, and he hasn’t seen—

Hasn’t noticed—

But Claude would have. He was always watching Dimitri back at the monastery, smiling blandly from across the table or eyeing him in their few shared classes. He made a point to shake hands after mock battles, as well, and there was that one training exercise when Dimitri had pulled a muscle, and Claude had figured it out just by the way he held his sword—

He’d offered him a lotion for the bruise, hadn’t he?

And when the war started to turn sour, when Edelgard’s forces threatened to overtake them on all sides and their allies shied from Dimitri like rabbits before a hunter, Claude had brokered the only peace he could find that would end with all parties walking out of it alive.

Even if it did end up with Dimitri in chains.

“He didn’t want me to die,” Dimitri says, and Felix lets out an agonized groan from the cart that has Dimitri wheeling in alarm. Two of the soldiers slow their horses, but Felix is just trying to push the wyvern off his chest, legs flailing in the hay.

“That’s it,” he growls, as the wyvern nips playfully at his collar and chirps like a bird. “You aren’t a king anymore, so I’m not gonna get whipped for kicking your _fucking_ ass you absolute fucking _brick_ of a noble fucking—“

“Forgive me,” a soldier says, leaning down from his horse, “but what exactly did you do to him?”

“Oh, no,” Dimitri says. “He’s actually in a good mood if he’s threatening to—“

Felix grabs the wyvern under her haunches and carries her like a toddler on his hip as he lurches out of the cart. “Of _course_ he didn’t want you dead,” he says. “None of us want you dead, you’re the only one who wants to talk to _ghosts_ all day—“

“It’s fine,” Dimitri says, when the soldier makes to get down from his horse. “I wouldn’t want to spoil his fun.”

“Go right to hell,” Felix says. The wyvern licks his cheek and snaps her teeth a few inches from his chin, and Felix sways under her weight, grabs the cart for balance, and curses darkly as he realizes, too late, that he just put all his weight on his injured arm. Dimitri grabs him before he falls, and the wyvern hisses. Spines flare at her neck like the crest of a lizard, and her tail wraps around Felix’s other arm.

“I’m _fine,_ ” Felix says, lying facefirst in the hay. Dimitri tries to roll him over, but the wyvern hisses and snaps, nearly taking off a finger for his trouble. One of the soldiers stifles a laugh, and the horses ahead of them shift as a flash of green and gold appears between them. Claude, dressed in long, loose trousers he’s stuffed into his boots and a tunic tied in the middle with his Von Riegan sash of office, grins wide when he sees the wyvern standing guard over Felix.

“I’m going to commission a painting of this,” he says.

Felix pushes himself up, dislodging the wyvern, and goes dangerously pale. He collapses on his back with a faint moan, and Claude leans over to press a hand to his forehead. The wyvern hisses, but Claude hisses back, and the wyvern tilts her head to the side in bewilderment.

“You have to know how to talk to them,” he says, when he catches Dimitri’s eye. “How’re we holding up?”

“You shot me,” Felix says, and Claude’s grin widens. “So I’m holding up fine.”

“I drugged you, too, you know,” Claude says. “Just in case you’re making a list.”

Felix squints up at him. “I am now.”

Claude digs into his tunic and comes up with a bag of dried fruit, which he hands to Felix. “It’s sweet, but you’ll survive. And feed the wyvern the red ones, she’ll like them.” Felix gives the wyvern a wary glance, and she inches closer. “Her name’s Princess.”

“I’m not really... I don’t... like animals...” Felix says, as he pulls out a strip of red fruit and tosses it at the wyvern. She snaps it up and flutters her spines, and Claude shoots Dimitri a knowing look. 

“Someone’s gonna come by and change your bandages,” Claude says. He doesn’t blink at Felix’s dark glare. “I mean, you could do it yourself, then we can chop off the arm when it’s gone green...”

“We, huh,” Felix says. Claude winks and jerks his head at Dimitri.

“Come on, we’re stopping at the springs for lunch. You ever been to the springs this side of the Alliance?”

“Not exactly,” Dimitri says. He gives Felix a look, but Felix just rolls his eyes and waves him on before the wyvern tries to shove her nose in his bag. Dimitri reluctantly lets Claude pull him away from Felix, and notes that half the soldiers peel from the cart and follow them at a leisurely distance. 

“It’s a shame this place has seen so much fighting between Almyra and Fodlan,” Claude says, as they pass through the underbrush at the side of the road and onto a small footpath. “This could be a nice tourist destination. Springs right on the side of a mountain, waterfalls and all. No leeches unless you go to the creek down the hill. Lots of deer.”

“You’ve been here before, then.”

“Once or twice. Gotta get the layout of the place, you know?” Claude points ahead of them, towards a gap in the trees, and the soldiers behind them fan out, disappearing into the background. “This way.”

Dimitri stiffens, and Claude sighs. “It isn’t an ambush,” he says. “Or an assassination. I didn’t get you all this way just to kill you in the woods, you know.”

Dimitri remembers the tight grip of Claude’s fingers around the handle of Edelgard’s axe, and nods slowly. He follows him into a small clearing, where a series of waterfalls pour into clear pools ringed by stone, and isn’t surprised to see Claude’s wyvern paddling in one of the lower pools, tail twisting in the water like that of a crocodile. Claude whistles, and the wyvern looks his way and chirps faintly.

“Beautiful girl,” Claude says, in a soft voice. “But let’s not swim with her. We’ll go to the next pool up.”

“I never said I’d...” Dimitri stops, recalling the state he was in when Felix first found him, years after Edelgard revealed her true colors at the monastery. How he’s had to practically drag him to the baths, force him to eat, reminding him every agonizing step of the way how to be human again. “Ah,” he says. “That would be best. Why aren’t the others...?”

“Oh, they’ll give it a shot later,” Claude says. “You’re just, you know, not supposed to bathe with a king in Almyra.”

“Kind of them to assume I am one,” Dimitri says, and Claude flashes him another smile, all teeth. 

“Kingship runs in the blood there,” he says. “Sort of like the Alliance, but the Alliance likes to pretend there are elections once in a while. Yes, look at this.” He lets out a soft whoop at the sight of the upper pool, cold and clear and pleasantly shallow, and unties his sash. He rips off his tunic before Dimitri can blink, and crouches to remove his boots. Dimitri coughs slightly, and he turns.

“What? You don’t bathe in Faerghus?”

“Of course we—“ Dimitri sighs heavily and starts unlacing his shirt. “It was just... sudden.”

“I’ve been dying to get in here since Edelgard said she wouldn’t cut off my head in my sleep for taking you with me,” Claude says, kicking off his boots. He wriggles out of his pants, and Dimitri’s fingers fumble at the sight of him, surprisingly solid and well-toned, brown skin gleaming in the sun. Claude shucks off his underthings, and Dimitri forces his gaze up to the gold pendant resting in the hollow of Claude’s bare neck.

“Coward,” Claude says, and jumps in.

Well. Dimitri hastily disrobes, leaving his clothes in a tidy pile on a sunny rock, and slips into the pool. The water is a shock at first, but when he goes under, it’s as though he’s sloughing off the tension of weeks on the road. He rises to the surface and spots Claude treading water, watching him carefully.

Just as he’s always watched him.

“You know I can’t stay in Almyra,” Dimitri says. Claude’s smile falters. “It’s a nice thought, Claude, I appreciate the... sentiment, but I can’t let my family’s killer go loose.”

“We’ll have time to work something out,” Claude says. “I promise. But. You can’t stay in Fodlan, either, you know that. It’d be a death sentence.”

“Felix has assured me of that often enough,” Dimitri says. 

“He’s a smart one, when he isn’t desperate.” Claude floats on his back, and Dimitri tries not to turn away like a blushing noblewoman at a ball. “You should listen to him.”

“I try.” Dimitri tilts his head back, runs his hands through his hair. His fingers catch on the strap of his eyepatch, and he unties it. “But his voice isn’t always the loudest in the room.”

“I know.”

Dimitri drops his patch on the edge of the pool and dives under again. He can just see Claude above him, legs sinking under the water, and notes that one of his calves is visibly swollen—Felix must be right, then. He rises at Claude’s side, and Claude sputters and nearly sinks the rest of the way. He swings an arm around Dimitri’s shoulder, and one of his legs involuntarily slides between Dimitri’s, parting his thighs. He hisses out a sharp breath and touches Claude’s waist to steady him.

“You put much on the line for me,” Dimitri says. They’re close enough that Dimitri can almost see the faint symbol etched on the pendant around Claude’s neck, and he doesn’t resist when Claude pushes them gently towards the waterfall above them, which gives them welcome shade from the sun. He feels more secure, here with stone at his back and the spray of the waterfall casting a halo around Claude’s bare shoulders, and when he raises his hand to grip Claude’s chin, he can feel the smile under his thumb.

“Good of you to notice,” Claude says, and kisses him.

Dimitri hasn’t kissed anyone in years, not since well before the monastery, but he falls back into it easily with Claude digging his fingers in his hair and biting his lower lip. Claude grabs the stone behind them with one arm, and hooks a leg around Dimitri’s for balance as Dimitri pulls back for air, stares into his heated, slightly hesitant eyes, and kisses his neck. Claude makes a soft sound at that, and Dimitri smiles a little, nipping the delicate skin at the join of his neck and shoulder. Claude drags him up for another deep, desperate kiss, and Dimitri isn’t sure if the moan he hears is Claude’s or his own’s, muffled by the pounding of the waterfall. 

“Okay,” Claude says, in a breathless sort of whisper, as Dimitri draws his attention to the line of his jaw. “Okay.” He lightly kisses Dimitri’s temple, his forehead, his cheek, running his free hand through Dimitri’s hair and down over his shoulders and back. Dimitri luxuriates in the touch, in the firm, sure way Claude pins him to the wall of the pool one-handed, the feel of his breath on Dimitri’s skin. Then Claude pulls back, leaving Dimitri almost panting at the loss, and glances over his shoulder. 

“They’re gonna wonder where we’ve gone,” he whispers, and when Dimitri groans, Claude laughs softly and kisses him one more time. “You sound like Felix with that wyvern.”

“And who’s the wyvern?” Dimitri asks, as Claude swims out into the open again, smiling in a patch of sunlight. “You?”

“Right now? Probably,” Claude says, and whistles twice, two low notes that ring across the empty pools. Down below, out of sight, Claude’s wyvern whistles back.

Slowly, shaking his head as Claude rolls on the surface of the water like the self-satisfied wyvern he claims to be, Dimitri pushes off from the wall and into the light of the afternoon sun.


	6. Chapter 6

Felix lies back in the clean, slightly itchy hay of the cart he now calls home, and tries not to think about Dimitri. This is, he realizes, not an uncommon occurrence. For a man who claims to eschew the trappings of knighthood that led to the death of his brother and father, Felix can’t shake the sense that if he isn’t with Dimitri right now, watching Claude’s every move like a hawk, he’s somehow letting the side down.

It’s what brought him here in the first place. What kept him sleeping in hastily-dug trenches far from the eyes of Claude’s scouts, what forced him to throw his worn, seemingly useless body into an enemy camp. Alone.

To rescue a man who slaughtered his enemies like a beast, panting over the bloodstained earth with his shoulders hunched, lips curled in a snarl of rage. A king in the service of ghosts.

And now Claude was with him. Making him smile. Guiding him so easily, the way Felix and the others never could. Claude, with his false smile and clever tongue, shouting orders in Almyran while Felix broke from the grass at the edge of camp. Claude, the man who could shoot a feather off a post a hundred yards away, aiming right for the meat of Felix’s shoulder, well out of range of his heart.

“Excuse me. Mr. Faerghus.”

Felix struggles to sit up in the cart, dislodging the wyvern from where she’s quietly chewing on his hair. A young girl is climbing into the cart, dressed in the same green uniform Felix has seen on some of the younger members of the company, and her hair is wrapped in a pale pink scarf with embroidered rabbits. She lands in the cart with a thump, and the wyvern looks up at her expectantly, chirping softly.

“My name isn’t Faerghus,” Felix says.

The girl gives him a withering look. “Well, we haven’t been introduced, have we, so what else do I call you? Sword Man?”

Felix, who hadn’t expected to be accosted by irate eleven year olds when he woke up this morning, just stares.

“My name’s Tas, anyway,” the girl says, “and I don’t care who you are, because you’ve gone and imprinted on _my_ wyvern.”

“What?” Felix glances over his shoulder, where Princess the wyvern—an apt name, now that he’s seen her owner—is happily ripping his cloak to shreds. “Oh. No, she isn’t mine. You can keep her.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tas says. She pulls out a bag of... yes, those are definitely dead mice... and starts feeding them to the wyvern. The cheerful crunch of small bones giving way makes Felix regret eating the dried fruit in his own bag. “She’s claimed you. Basic wyvern lore. If a wyvern claims you, she’s not gonna let anyone else ride her. Not for long. Why do you think the king never swapped out his girl? They imprinted. Like you.” She scowls. “I was _hoping_ he might take to Princess, too, but I guess not.”

“I have no intention of imprinting on anything,” Felix protests. 

“It’s like ducklings,” Tas says, wiping her hands on her pants. “You don’t get a choice.”

“Apparently, I don’t get a choice in much of anything these days.”

“Yeah, but that’s cause the king likes you,” Tas says. She leans over and scratches Princess under the chin. Princess starts to purr like a cat, and Felix tentatively reaches out to touch her smooth, mottled blue scales. “My dad says he kind of like, adopts people, sometimes. And cats. And wyverns. The grumpier the better.”

“Really.” Felix touches the wyvern’s chest, where the rumbling is loudest, and the wyvern chirps at him. He carefully weighs the risks while Tas shows him how to pet Princess properly, both hands on either side of her neck, and looks down at the girl. She’s humming under her breath, and the wyvern is watching her intently, wagging her head to the sound. It reminds Felix of the way Claude greeted his wyvern that morning, nonsensically whistling back and forth like a pair of demented birds.

“Your king picks a funny way of adopting people,” he says at last. “Or does he always shoot his wyverns on sight?”

“He wasn’t trying to kill you or anything,” Tas says, and Felix holds his breath. “Besides, he’s shot wyverns before. Wild ones. Sometimes you have to, cause they steal sheep and goats and stuff, but he’s good at keeping them alive afterwards. Dad says he’d be one of the best wyvern tamers out there if he weren’t royal.”

Felix sits back in the cart, letting the past six or seven years of his life rattle apart and resettle again. Of course he always knew Claude was hiding something—Claude almost flaunted his secrets, back at the monastery—but he always assumed it was because he was some noble bastard from another line, wriggling his way into the von Riegan family with a crest in tow. But he’d followed the company for three days before he made his wild break for Dimitri, and not everything had added up. Claude was too comfortable with the Almyrans. He spoke the language fluently—Felix, who had to have a crash course in a noble’s grasp of the language after his brother died, only knows basic words like _stop, surrender,_ and _drop your weapons_ —and they followed his orders without question, which they’d never do for a Fodlan noble. And the way he fought—those flashy moves that made Felix grit his teeth and head out to the training yards at midnight to try and recreate them—it was a different style, but not unfamiliar; Because Felix was trained to recognize Almyran fighting tactics.

He should have figured it out years ago.

“But if you’re her human now, I suppose I’ll have to be your squire until you figure things out properly.” Felix’s brain, operating on overdrive, picks up the words out of pure self defense, and Felix sits up.

“No,” he says. “Absolutely not. I’m not training anyone to be a knight—“

“Ugh.” Tas scoffs, lips curled. “A knight? Like in Fodlan? Gross. No. I mean a squire. I’m still a page ‘cause none of my wyverns have a rider yet and my older sister’s doing the whole soldier thing, but if I squire to someone for a while, Dad’ll let me work in the training yards full time.”

“So you’re using me to advance your career,” Felix says. She shrugs.

“I guess. I figure, if I can teach a pale, skinny Fodlan noble how to look after a wyvern, King Khalid’s gonna _have_ to let me work with him.” She leans forward. “So?”

“I’m technically a prisoner,” Felix says, struggling to find purchase in an unfamiliar sea. “I can’t pay you.”

“The king likes you,” Tas says. “And so does Princess. Give me a chance. I’m clever, and smart, and cunning, and—“

“Goddess, fine,” Felix says. “Fine. If you can get her to stop eating my hair, we have a deal.”

Tas pumps her fists in the air just in time for Claude, his hair curling damp and thick in his eyes, to swoop in from behind and lift her out of the cart. She shrieks, kicking wildly, but the soldiers watching Felix just smile and shake their heads as Claude lifts her in the air like a dancer.

“What are you doing with Felix, you little beast?” he asks, and Tas grins.

“Squiring,” she says. “I’m his new wyvern tamer.”

“Poor thing,” Claude says, and for a second, Felix isn’t sure who he’s trying to address. He plops Tas on her feet and gestures to the wyvern. “She needs a walk, kiddo.”

“I’m not a kid,” Tas mutters, and clucks to Princess, who reluctantly gets to all four paws. She flaps her wings, clipping Felix on the arm, and grunts as she lifts off into the air. Claude smiles fondly as Tas, with just the faintest tremor to her hands, calls Princess to her.

“Didn’t think you needed a squire,” Claude says, as girl and wyvern wind their way between the horses. Dimitri appears at Claude’s side, looking uncomfortably red at the ears, and Felix narrows his eyes. 

Well. That’s new.

“I was cornered,” Felix says, trying to catch Dimitri’s eye. Dimitri rubs the back of his neck and stares off into the trees, suddenly vitally interested in the foliage. “And I can’t have a wyvern, either, imprinted or no. I can barely stand horses as it is.”

Dimitri almost laughs. “Is this because the time when you were eight, and the mare you wanted ate your—“

“Enough,” Felix snaps, and Dimitri _does_ laugh, this time. It wasn’t Felix’s fault that Glenn’s horse was a fucking menace, anyways.

“I’ll have to hear about this one,” Claude says. “But, uh. If you don’t want her, we can try and get her to bond with someone else. It’s a slow process, but it can happen, sometimes.”

“What if it doesn’t?” Felix asks.

“Well, if you reject her, she might...” Claude waves his hand in a circle. “Stop eating, sort of...”

Felix glances at Dimitri. He can’t help but think of the past few months in his service, dragging him through the motions of living, forcing him to eat, snarling and cursing his way through convincing Dimitri to stop for five fucking seconds and get some sleep. Lying awake while Dimitri prowled the outskirts of the camp. Dedue managed it better than Felix, most days, but it took both of them to distract him from the call of his ghosts long enough to live. They’re all thinner than they used to be, those of Dimitri’s house who remain, but Felix and Dedue took it hardest. Felix is all sharp angles, now, nowhere to hide from Claude’s discerning gaze.

Felix squints. “You put me in a cart with her on purpose.”

“Well, yes,” Claude says, shamelessly unbothered by this revelation. “But not with that in mind.”

“At least I won’t be bored in Almyran prison,” Felix says. He looks at Claude.  
“I assume Dimitri won’t be, either, if the king has anything to say about it.”

Claude’s smile freezes.

Dimitri, who is too busy saddling his massive, easygoing horse, turns with a quirk of his brow. “What was that, Felix?”

Claude hooks his thumbs in his belt and meets Felix’s gaze. “Alright,” he says. “You convinced me. I’ll take you for a test run.”

“A—a _what?_ ”

“Can’t have a wyvern tamer as a squire if you’ve never flown before,” Claude says. He grabs Felix by the arm, and Dimitri pushes away from the horse. “Don’t have to twist _my_ arm, Felix. I can see it all over your face. You’re _dying_ to go.”

“Hold on,” Dimitri says. “He’s wounded, you can’t just—“

“Fine,” Felix says. He needs to have a few words with him, anyways—might as well do it on a giant flying lizard. Dimitri gives Felix a wary look. “He won’t kill me, Dimitri.”

“I’ll have him back before you know it,” Claude says. He steers Felix away, but not before he lets his free hand brush along Dimitri’s side, so casually that only Felix notices the shiver that runs through Dimitri’s skin. Fuck. 

If he isn’t careful, he’s going to have to push the king of Almyra off his fucking wyvern.


End file.
